Oil Barons is both a strategy and simulation-type, turn-based game, published by Epyx in 1983. It was released in versions compatible with the Apple II series, Commodore 64, and DOS varieties of home computer. It is considered to be one of the rarest of all Epyx games.
Oil Barons represents an unusual fusion between a computer game and a board game, in that it included a game board consisting of a 50 X 40 square grid, as well as numerous individual game tokens, used to denote the significance of various grid locations (which corresponded to various terrain-specific locations within the game). Oil Barons was thus much like a numerically complex board game, in which the computer kept track of the numerous variables. The game could be played in any one of several modes, and with from one to eight players. Unfortunately, the fact this game has been out-of-print since the mid-1980s, and thus very few people today have an Oil Barons game board and tokens (particularly in light of the fact that only a very small number of copies were sold when it was in publication), potentially limits the game's appeal in contemporary times.
Famous quotes containing the words oil and/or barons:
“I became increasingly anarchistic. I began to find people of my own class vicious, people in clean collars uninteresting. I even accepted smells, personal as well as official. Everyone who came to the studio smelled either of machine oil or herring.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“We live by our imaginations, by our admirations, by our sentiments. The child walks amid heaps of illusions, which he does not like to have disturbed. The boy, how sweet to him his fancy! how dear the story of barons and battles! What a hero he is, whilst he feeds on his heroes! What a debt is his to imaginative books!”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)